Managing Scientific Metadata Using XML
IEEE Internet Computing
A Distributed Enhanced Server for Multidimensional Scientific Data
Computing in Science and Engineering
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Abstract: With explosively increasing volumes of remote sensing, model and other Earth Science data available and the popularity of the Internet, scientists are now facing challenges to publish and to find interesting data sets effectively and efficiently. Metadata have been recognized as a key technology to ease the search and retrieval of Earth science data. In this paper, we discuss the DIstributed MEtadata Server (DIMES) prototype system. Designed to be flexible yet simple, DIMES uses XML to represent, store, retrieve and interoperate metadata in a distributed environment. DIMES accepts metadata in any well-formed XML format and thus assumes the "tree" semantics of metadata entries. Additional domain knowledge can be represented as specific links through XML ID/IDREF(s) mechanism. DIMES provides a number of mechanisms, including the "nearest neighbor search", to navigate and to search metadata. Though started for the Earth Science community, DIMES can be easily extended to serve scientific communities in other disciplines.